


nonlinear theory for dummies

by Inkjade



Series: world enough [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Gen, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Siblings, The Family That Snarks Together Stays Together, putting the fun in dysfunctional, well they all do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: After forty-five years of fighting, it's kind of hard to know how to stop.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Allison Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Diego Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Luther Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves
Series: world enough [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1894417
Comments: 88
Kudos: 855
Collections: Creatures and Gods and Magicals Fics





	nonlinear theory for dummies

When Five drags himself out of his sleeping bag in the attic, the downstairs of the cabin already smells like heaven, which is to say, strong coffee. He squints at his watch: almost nine am, for god’s sake. Two days of hiding out in this kitchy shithole with his siblings and he’s losing the good habits of fifty years.

“This is going well,” he mutters.

“Boo,” Klaus says, thrusting a cup of coffee in his face. Five sidesteps across the tiny kitchen, nearly implanting himself in the counter. He scowls, heart thumping, and steps back across to grab the coffee before Klaus can drop it or drink it. His weirdest brother is wearing an old-fashioned looking nightgown and a smarmy smile. He’s also got the bruised eye-sockets of bad sleep and his hands aren’t all that steady. Five sips and bites down on a thank you: it is unexpectedly good coffee.

“Thank god I remembered this place.” Klaus turns on the kitchen faucet and bends to stick his head under the water, then shakes like a dog and sprays everything in the immediate vicinity, including Five. “I knew Tilly would never let it go. Good thing she didn’t decide to rent it out, huh?”

“Hopefully we won’t have to stay here long enough to find out.”

“So what’s the plan, we gonna kick those impostors out and reclaim our happy home?”

It sounds even more ridiculous than Klaus intends it to. “First we need to figure out what we changed,” Five says. He downs another scalding, glorious mouthful. Klaus might be only half-there most of the time, but apparently he knows how to make a decent cup of coffee, so he’s marginally useful. “Don’t bother: I’ll do it. It could have been any one of you pea brains, or all of you.”

“ _Us_ , mein bruder. Any one of _us_. You might not have been living there but you weren’t exactly tip-toeing around in the past.”

That stings, though it’s fair. He knows perfectly well that his leapfrogging around in time is the root cause of too many of their problems.

“Well, only one of us started a _cult_ , Klaus,” Five says. Snaps. Maybe snarls. Klaus’s eyes flick down and away, the way they used to when Dad—shit.

Jesus, keep it together, he thinks.

They’re all so _breakable_. He tries to remember himself at thirty and knows it’s stupid to try: he was hanging onto sanity by a thread by then, talking to everything and anything just to hear a voice and chewing Dolores’s ear off about the math, the endless almighty math; he had found a singed copy of _Metamorphoses_ to read her in the afternoons and spent weeks thinking of himself as an insect crawling busily through a vast grave, because that was exactly what he had been. They are breakable, but he skipped right to broken. There is no comparison.

Five huffs the sleep-frazzled hair out of his eyes and dumps the rest of his coffee into a stomach clenching up like a fist. He was never so fragile even when he was the age this body is, and the years have furnished him with thick skin over the scars. “I’ll figure it out,” he says. “We still have the briefcase, we can go back and fix it.”

He is shit at comfort.

“Maybe,” someone says from behind him, and he’s on the other side of the room again before he recognizes Allison’s voice. She throws him a look he can’t interpret—but then, Five can’t accurately interpret an annoying percentage of the things his siblings do these days—and pulls a mug out of a cupboard.

There will be less coffee. Five supposes that’s all right. Klaus will make more. “ _Maybe_ ,” Allison reprises, glowering over her shoulder as she pours, “we should try fixing us first this time.”

Oh god. They’re going to want to talk, aren’t they. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Yeah!” Klaus spreads his arms and turns, making the nightgown bell outward. “This is perfection, honey. Ain’t no fixing this.”

“Our powers,” Allison says, rolling her eyes. “Since it seems most of us still don’t have a handle on them, and we may be going up against other powered people. I’m not suggesting group therapy, Five. Christ, I don’t even want to imagine how that would go.”

“Mmn,” Klaus says, stuffing a handful of cereal into his mouth like a toddler. “Horribly. Luther and Diego would punch it out and leak manly tears, Vanya would level the building, and Five would murder us all.”

“Or you’d sob like a baby and Luther would get nervous again and smoke us out,” Diego declares, staggering in with his hair in wild loops around his face. There is even less coffee. “That elevator fart was one for the books.”

Klaus takes the last of the coffee. The coffee is now gone. “True. I knew One could be deadly,” he says, ruining a perfectly good beverage with spoonful after spoonful of sugar. “But I had no idea he could be silent.”

And then his three idiot siblings catch a collective case of the giggles.

They’ve altered the timeline in some way none of them understands, and may have erased their own childhood as a result. They’re hiding in the cabin of some old rich lady so brainwashed by _Klaus_ in her youth that she left this house to him. They’ve been replaced by another batch of powered people that Reginald Hargreaves has no doubt screwed up in new and exciting ways, who will probably feel compelled to come after them to impress dear old Dad. The seven of them were all that stood between _two_ world-ending events. But apparently fart jokes are still funny.

 _I carried you around in my head for four and a half decades,_ he could bellow. _I buried your bodies in the rubble and I still dragged you all with me everywhere I went. I went crazy and sane and crazy over and over again trying to get back to you. I’ve lost count of how many people I killed to be here. For god’s sake, you imbiciles, at least meet me halfway._

“Make more coffee,” Five says, and jumps to the attic to pace and do the math and pace some more. 

~~~

The math eludes him. There is so much they all could have changed.

He is so _stupid_ sometimes: it occurs to him that every measly victory he’s snatched from comprehensive defeat has been a half-measure, practically an accident. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that his leaving in 2002 might have started them all down this path; certainly his perpetual kicking at the footballs the Handler held out for him came at crucial moments. Crucial seconds, really, where his presence might or might not have been a deciding factor, if he’d bothered to be there.

 _Seconds_. He should have known. Dad kept pushing him at little jumps in his long-ago training sessions, and it took him forty-five years to figure out the trajectory of that lesson. In the end he’d needed yet another push, from a man who didn’t even know him this time around.

The math is bigger than him. It is an immovable object. Five is not the irresistible force he thought he was, needs to be.

“Stupid old man,” Five breathes, and throws his mind against it anyway, because what else is there to do.

~~

When hunger finally drives him downstairs again the sun’s just starting to set: it pierces through the trees and lays their rustling shadows on the ugly rug in the living room. Five halts to stare at the leaf patterns and smell whatever his siblings made for dinner, pasta with sauce by the scent. He’d eaten noodles raw when he found the rare grocery store still standing: what water he could scrounge was too precious to use for boiling. Only much later had it occurred to him that the broth probably would have been good, too, a way to extend the calories. Dumb kid. How many times had he almost starved to death?

“ _Five_ ,” Luther says, by the sound of it not for the first time. Five scowls at his tone and jumps to the kitchen. The sink is full of dirty dishes. There is a bowl of spaghetti with marinara on the counter. He swallows down a dry throat and tips his chin at Klaus, who has changed into tight purple pants and a ludicrously frilly apron and is washing dishes.

Probably he should spend an hour down here or someone will come banging on the attic door, demanding he participate. He supposes he can spare an hour.

The spaghetti is good: he was starting to get the shakes. “Thanks,” he mutters when Klaus tugs the empty bowl from him. He sidesteps to the living room, away from Klaus’s mocking gasp.

Five should maybe say thank you more often. They’re still young; they’re trying. It’s possible he’s gone a little feral in the last few decades.

Now Vanya is laying on the ugly rug with her eyes shut, breathing in short puffs of air: above her hovers a shimmer of contained shockwave. The skin of her face has paled, the shadows under her eyes are blue and cold. Five tamps down the urge to jump away. His mousy little sister, who used to feed the birds in the yard and helped Mom stitch them up after missions, could probably take him out without breaking a sweat. It makes him twitchy.

Overhead a ceiling tile cracks, and Vanya deflates on a burble of a sigh. The shimmer dissipates. Five’s hair flutters. “Damn,” Vanya mutters. “It’s like trying to grab hold of a bar of wet soap, it just keeps slipping out of my hands.”

“Just don’t bend over, baby,” Klaus sings. Vanya snorts; there is a clink of breaking glass from somewhere.

It’s nice to see her smile.

“Oh, maybe you can help me,” she says, looking up at him. Five sighs and sits on the couch. One hour. “We’re trying to—”

“I know. Taking a night off to work on our powers.”

He didn’t intend for that to come out quite so meanly, but. It _is_ stupid.

“It’s not a _night off_ , Five,” Vanya says, sitting up. Her chin sticks out the way it did when she couldn’t get a piece right on the violin. “It’s a good idea. Until we figure out what the others can do, and how to get back to our lives, we don’t know what we’re gonna have to deal with, and personally, I’m tired of trying to do one thing with my powers and having it go sideways. I just want to get some…” she waves a hand and slumps. “Fine control, I guess?”

“A guarantee you won’t go off like a bomb when the shit hits would be nice,” Diego says around a mouthful of pasta. He slides a sideways look at her and shrugs. “But I guess I could stand to train too. I didn’t know I could stop that many bullets at once until I was doing it, but man, it took a lot out of me. And if you hadn’t swooped in and blown those assholes away, it wouldn’t have been worth anything anyway. That was badass, sister.”

Luther lumbers in: the couch sags when he sits on the other end of it and Five pulls himself upright by the cushioned arm, trying not to bristle. He never got tall like the rest of them did except Vanya, but christ does he hate being so short, massing so little. “I could probably stand to figure out how to use all this muscle without smashing everything in sight,” Luther declares. The self-awareness in that statement is astounding, if awfully damned late. 

“And I’d really like to know how to how to _stop_ ghosts from possessing me, now that they can,” Klaus sighs, flopping into a chair.

“I’ll referee,” Allison says. She waves off Diego’s objection. “Unless one of you is volunteering to let me practice on you?”

“ _Hell_ no.”

“No thanks.”

“Pass.”

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“Five?”

Five frowns. Why is she even asking? “Definitely not.”

“I _meant_ what do you want to work on.”

Smelling smoke without seeing their bodies, hearing their voices without wondering if he’s hallucinating, waking up without wondering if he’s dreaming, remembering without reliving, forgetting, sleeping thought a night.

Five lifts a shoulder, settles his spine. “I’ve got the timeline stuff to work out,” he says: this goes over as expected. He heaves a sigh. “ _Fine_ , assholes: I’ll think of something, assuming there’s booze around here somewhere. If not, I’m going back upstairs.”

“You can’t seriously have _everything_ about your powers worked out, can you?” Vanya reaches behind the coffee table and passes him a bottle of gin. “I mean, Dallas. Or—would you have gotten where you were planning to go if you hadn’t taken all of us?”

“Probably not,” Five admits. “My best guess is I retraced my last time jump by instinct. I came to 2019 from 1963 in Dallas: in extremity, I must have reversed that process, except I couldn’t carry all of you the whole way.” He rubs his forehead, opens the bottle, which has already seen some withdrawals this evening, by the look of it. The gin is warm and tangy; it loosens the tension in his chest a little.

“I never thought about it, but I guess we’re lucky you didn’t take us all to your apocalypse,” Klaus says pensively, and utterly idiotically. “The first one, I mean.”

Five shivers. “Impossible,” he mutters.

Vanya tugs the bottle from him and swigs, passes it back, scootches up to lean against the couch near him. Her shoulder pushes against his leg. The stupid child’s body he’s wearing like a badly fitted coat wants to lean toward her: he doesn’t remember being clingy as a teenager, but there’s a lot he doesn’t remember well, and a time he’d have given anything at all just for a few minutes of this. He tamps down another shiver and soothes his dry throat with more expensive booze.

Because of the gin, or because Vanya is warm pressed against his calf, her breath moving her shoulder moving his knee, Five adds: “I did something new the other day; if we really have to proceed with this halfassed reenactment of our training days, I guess I can explore that.”

“Oh? Do tell.” His littlest, deadliest sister blinks up at him. He can see the gin has unwound her a little; they must have gotten started over supper.

“After you. Or was that little cloud the best you’ve got?”

Vanya’s expression flips through several emotions, not all of which he can identify, and settles on challenge. She blinks and her eyes flare white; a cupboard in the cabinet across the room flaps open, making Klaus jump and yelp. Her face crumples in concentration. If Five focuses he can feel—something: his skin prickles and his shoulders twitch. The cabinet rattles, and a bottle of what looks like rum rolls out. Allison bends to pick it up.

“Much better,” Luther breathes.

“Thanks,” Vanya mutters. “I keep thinking it should be about aiming, but I don’t think it is: it’s kind of like—tuning? I don’t know. It’s actually easier to just wipe everything out. This little stuff is hard.”

“I was just thinking I’d like a rum and coke,” Klaus says happily. Allison laughs and tosses him the bottle. Klaus fumbles and saves it with a dramatic dive.

“Your turn, Five,” Vanya says, waving a hand at him. “Come on. Wow us.”

What the hell. He curls his hands, reaches for the feeling he’d found in the barn, in the moment he’s been not thinking about where he could feel the bullets burning in his guts and the blood pouring out of him, and he couldn’t hear any one of them breathing because they weren’t. Five takes a deep breath and pulls. The room shivers around him. There’s a tiny sun forming behind his breastbone. It doesn’t hurt like time jumps hurt. It doesn’t stretch him thin. It feels _right_ in some way he can’t quite quantify _:_ damn the old man anyway.

Five catches the bottle of rum as it rolls out of the cabinet.

His siblings blink at him. “You were just thinking you wanted a rum and coke,” he tells Klaus, who shuts his mouth with a hilariously baffled expression. “Vanya, you figured out it’s less like aiming and more like tuning, which makes sense since your powers work with sound.”

Vanya’s eyebrows climb her high forehead; she utters a startled little laugh.

Five tosses the bottle; Klaus fumbles it. Diego saves it and points it at him. “Holy shit, you hit rewind? That’s wild. I wondered how you got the drop on that platinum bitch so perfectly,” he says. “So what happened?”

“She got the drop on us in the middle of your little kumbaya circle.”

“Oh.” Diego opens the rum up and sniffs, declining to take offense. “Shit. Did we all die again?’

Embarrassingly, the reply gets stuck in Five’s throat. He coughs and jumps to the couch, peels the gin out of Vanya’s hands. “You did,” he agrees, and sits, washing down the memory with several swallows of gin. “In a spray of bullets.”

“We die kind of a lot,” Klaus complains. “No wonder you’re such a grumpy little bastard, Five. You must be pretty tired of turning back the clock, huh?”

“You have no idea,” Five sighs. “If you could all just stop, you know, doing that for a little bit.”

“But how’d _you_ manage to avoid getting shot?” Luther says. “You were right there with us. And the Commission was gunning for you in particular, I thought.”

The gin is starting to seep into his veins. “I didn’t.” Five rolls his head lazily, grateful for the way the booze slows him down, makes it easier to confess just how thoroughly he’d fucked up back in ’63. He leans his head back against the cushions. “I just died a little slower than the rest of you.”

“Oh.”

“Shit,” Diego says again.

They’re silent. It’s nice: he can listen to them breathing, fidgeting, all of them still as crap at staying still as they were when they were kids. Diego tips back the bottle of rum and coughs. Vanya leans carefully against his leg again, and his breath stutters; he twitches a shoulder and holds himself still. Allison comes to flop down between him and Luther, jostling him. Five tips his head to glare her off, but that is one tactic that never worked on Allison, who was always the most vicious opponent in training and the most unguarded of them outside it.

Five shuts his eyes, feeling exhaustion wear at this thin, bony body of his. The wall’s a little further out at thirteen than it was at fifty-eight, but hitting it is more sudden. He misses the endurance he’d carved into himself over the decades. He misses the adult muscle; not a lot of it, but certainly more than he’s got to work with now. He misses his scars, the map of accomplishments they were, even when they only marked the accomplishment of surviving what should have killed him. The post-puberty voice. The pain tolerance, which he’d never properly appreciated.

He misses the tolerance he’d built up for booze, too. A few swigs of gin and he is already swinging gently toward drunk.

“Thanks,” Allison says softly.

He’s missed some part of this conversation. Five opens an eye and hums a question. Allison rolls her eyes. “For saving us, you idiot. Thanks for saving us.”

“Again,” Luther adds.

His throat hurts. His jaw hurts. He closes his eyes and hums again, shrugs. “Somebody’s got to, don’t they? You dumb assholes keep duh-dying.”

Goddam this stupid hormone-riddled body and its mood swings and shitty breath control.

He needs to jump upstairs. Except it will be fleeing, which he doesn’t do, and also it will be obvious why, and fuck that. Fuck everything. Fuck them, fuck them _all_ , fuck them for not getting it together earlier, fuck them for making him chase after them, fuck them for not listening to him, for needing him to be more than the guy who blows in and resets the clock. Fuck them for making him dinner and joking with him and insisting he sleep and demanding he put off his work to come drink and mess around with powers like they’re still all on the same page, still all the same age, like they all grew up together, like there’s any chance at all he can bridge this gaping _canyon_ of experience and make them understand what he’s done, what he is. Fuck them for being so breakable. Fuck them for thinking he’s the same person who left, and fuck them for making him put them in the ground and stumble onward alone, getting steadily stranger, until he found them again. And again, and again. Fuck them for pinning him in place with their stupid expectations and their stupid, stupid love, for sitting here spectating while he’s gritting his teeth to stop his eyes watering because this useless kid’s body hasn’t yet learned to soldier on in all the ways he needs it to. Fuck them for seeing it, and for knowing him well enough to read it. Fuck them for remembering. Fuck them for making _him_ remember.

He’d thought he was prepared. He is a moron. He spent so many years dreaming about this, and not once did he imagine how much it might hurt.

“Yeah, whatever, grandpa,” Allison says, the smile audible in her voice. Five can’t turn to see if it’s on her face. He stares at the ceiling. She slides a hand over and covers his, which has turned into a fist. Tears are trickling slowly into his temples. There is no way she hasn’t noticed. “We know you love us.”

“Hnh,” Five says, like the idiot he is.

“You poor macho bastard,” Diego murmurs, which really is a degree of hypocrisy that ought to choke him dead right there.

“We love you too, Five,” Vanya says. Her head presses against his knee a little more firmly, trapping him: the point of contact aches. Everything aches. Five is drowning and furious, the big muscles of his limbs trembling with the need to run. He squeezes his eyes shut. Christ, he’s not a child, this is pointless, this is mortifying. “We missed you. You have no idea how much.”

“Hnh,” Five says again, stupidly. If anybody hugs him he will not be responsible for his actions. He knows somebody’s going to try. They will be sorry.

He’s so tired.

“ _Luther_!” Klaus howls out of nowhere, making both Allison and Vanya flinch. Five throws himself upright, looking wildly around for the threat.

“Sorry,” Luther mumbles. “The spaghetti. I don’t usually--I’m so sorry.”

“Oh my god,” Allison gasps. “Ugh. _Agh_. Oh god no.”

“ _Again_?”

“Somebody open a window, _Christ_.”

“Gah, it’s worse.” Vanya crawls up the couch and over Five to drag a throw pillow over her face. “It’s so much _worse_.”

Five sits back with an exasperated huff as the smell hits him. It is awful. Diego is tipping slowly sideways on the floor, felled by near-silent laughter. He catches Five’s eye and falls all the way over, flings an arm over his face.

Klaus has shrunk down in the chair. “Oh god, I might be dead,” he moans. “Is this what being dead is like, wait no, it’s not. It’s a new power, isn’t it, Luther. Take that, _Sparrow Academy_. Hey guys, think of how the bank hostage mission in ‘01 would have gone with _this_ in our corner.”

“You need a _bell_ , Luther,” Allison snarls, stalking toward the nearest window.

Their biggest brother has gone bright pink in the face, but he’s laughing a little too. “Wha--on my—on what? How would that even help--Look, I said I was sorry! I don’t eat pasta for a reason!”

“Then why did you!”

“Way to ruin a touching family moment, big guy.”

“Turns out one of us does have their shit together after all,” Diego wheezes, and curls up to cackle into his folded arms. Klaus folds over and howls. Allison pitches a small ceramic thing at them.

“ _Gross_ , Diego.”

It’s too much. They’re all too fucking much. God, he hates this family. Five leans forward to brace his head in his hands, but he’s laughing too hard to stay where he’s sitting. When was the last time he laughed like this? He slides off the couch and immediately chokes on the stench. Vanya helpfully shoves her pillow into his face. “Breathe, dammit,” she says.

It’s not funny, it’s juvenile and dumb. It doesn’t matter that he knows this: one of the many things he’s apparently forgotten is how easily they always caught each other’s moods, and a twenty-eight-year age difference doesn’t seem to render him immune. He curls into the pillow, which his sister is trying to reclaim. His sides hurt. Vanya’s hands bat at his head and he shoves at her with his foot. She falls off the couch onto him with all twelve of her incredibly pointy elbows. Five just flattens out under her, keeping hold of the pillow to hide his hot face.

“Assholes,” Luther grumbles. Vanya, face pressed to the other side of Five’s pillow, takes a breath that is ninety-percent snort.

"Is he saying he has more than one, because I would believe it," Vanya mumbles into the cloth. Five can't even push her off him, he's so weak from laughing.

"Shut up, Vanya, oh my god," he gasps.

It takes far too long for him to get a handle on himself. The only consolation is that he’s ahead of his siblings by perhaps thirty seconds.

“Why the hell did I save you all,” he sighs, and wipes his face on the pillow. “Goddamn but you guys grew up weird.”

Allison _hmphs_. “Says the time-travelling geriatric assassin in a kid’s body.”

“Who fought a younger version of himself in his old-man body just a few days ago and almost lost,” Luther adds. “That one _still_ makes my head hurt.”

“Dude,” Klaus says. “Weren’t you in a committed relationship with a _mannequin_ for like thirty years?”

“There was nobody else,” Five says into his pillow.

It is surprisingly easy to say.

Vanya gets a little heavier where she’s sprawled over him. Here it is: the inevitable hug. Of course it’s the only sibling he maybe can’t take in a fight. She pats his hair. He wonders wearily how much of his dignity is he expected to give up.

“Suck it up, old man,” his little sister whispers gently.

Five slides the pillow down to stare at her. Vanya stares back. Her mouth twitches at one corner the way it does when she can barely hold onto her poker face. Her eyes are a little worried, a little sad. He blinks and risks a look around at them, at all of them. Diego wears his confidence over his sadness, lopsided smirk and hunched shoulders; Allison looks aloof but desperately wants to be sprawled on the floor with him and Vanya. Luther carries his big body like Five carries his young one, like he doesn't know what to do with it, but he also hovers, ready to be of use, any sort of use. Klaus hides his weariness in his slouches.

They haven't changed that much. 

“Fuck off, Vanya,” Five says, and smacks her with the pillow, which means he loses the pillow. He could wrestle it back, but she can have it. She rolls over onto her back and rests her head on it, staring up. That weird little smile is still pulling her mouth up. It’s been a long, long time since he saw her happy. It’s been equally long since he felt that way, long enough that he forgot it.

“Face it, Five,” Vanya says, staring up at nothing. “You’re just as weird as we are.”

Five shifts, winces at a bruise he probably got three days and fifty-six years ago. He could sink right into this stupid shag carpet. He shouldn’t have had the gin: the last two weeks are really starting to pile up on him all of a sudden. His eyes are starting to cross.

He thinks about it: maybe a little too long, but they wait him out.

“Are you going to share that pillow or what,” Five says, and rolls over to hug his sister.


End file.
